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I wasn't going to post about this guy with the Obama monkey-doll. Then I watched the video again, and noticed something. There is nothing troubling about one lone racist nut in a crowd. What's troubling is the crowd. Dig how they just look on and smile uncomfortably. No one confronts him. This is the banality of evil, no? It isn't the guy doing the deed. Its the enablers who give comfort and haven to spew his hatred. On one level, I'm thankful for them. Anyone, who wants to now say that an Obama election proves that racism is dead will have to contend with this last week. And it isn't the nuts that this person must contend with---it's the crowds, the crowds who silently, and sometimes not so silently, just stand by and let it happen. They are all, to a man, cowards.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore -- not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-'90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

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